What we have to do, then, is to discover whether or not the poet means to keep the public out. If, after a careful examination of poems that seem to be only part of the game of high-brow baiting low-brow, they still resist all reasonable efforts, then we must conclude that such work is, after all, merely a joke at the plain reader’s expense and let him return to his newspapers and to his Shakespeare (who we are for the moment assuming is understood without difficulty). But if, on the other hand, we are able to get out of these poems the experiences we are accustomed to expect of poetry, or at least see that the poet originally wrote them as poetry and not as literary tricks, then the plain reader must make certain important alterations in his critical attitude. In the first place, he must admit that what is called our common intelligence is the mind in its least active state: that poetry obviously demands a more vigorous imaginative effort than the plain reader has been willing to apply to it; and that, if anthologies compiled to refresh tired minds have indulged his lazy reading habits, the poet can be excused for using exceptional means to make him do justice to his poems, even for inventing a new kind of poem in this end. Next he must wonder whether such innovations have not a real place in the normal course of poetry-writing. Finally, if these things are so, he must question the depth of his understanding of the poetry which, like Shakespeare’s, is taken for granted and ask whether a poet like E. E. Cummings must not be accepted, if not for his own sake, at least for his effect on the future reading of poetry of any age or style. To begin with, we shall choose one of E. E. Cummings’ earlier and simpler poems, one which will nevertheless excite much the same hostility as his later work. It is unusually suitable for analysis, because it is on just the kind of subject that the plain reader looks for in poetry. It appears, moreover, in Mr. Louis Untermeyer’s popular _Anthology of Modern American Poetry_ side by side with the work of poets more willing than E. E. Cummings to defer to the intelligence-level of the plain reader. It is all the more important to study, because Mr. Untermeyer seems personally hostile to Cummings’ work and yet to have been forced by the pressure of more advanced critical opinion to include it in a book where modernism in poetry means, in Mr. Untermeyer’s own definition, simplicity (“the use of the language of everyday speech” and the discarding of that poetical padding which the plain reader and the plain critic enjoy more than Mr. Untermeyer would admit). But Mr. Untermeyer is speaking of a modernism no longer modern, that of such dead movements as Georgianism and Imagism which were supposedly undertaken in the interests of the plain reader. We are dealing here with a modernism with apparently no feelings of obligation to the plain reader, undertaken, presumably, in the interests of poetry.